The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  In 1911, in response to a Schoenberg concert, he painted Impression III (Concert). Kandinsky later defined “Composition” as “planned and rationally structured ‘Improvisations.’” But by now he was at variance with other members of the NKVM and, that year, when the association refused to show his Composition IV he resigned, together with Marc, Münter, and a few others and mounted a rival exhibition.38

  The following year Kandinsky showed several works at the famous Cologne Sonderbund Exhibition and published extracts of Concerning the Spiritual in Art in Camera Work, a journal produced by Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer whose “291” gallery in New York specialized in contemporary art.39 In February 1913 he took part in the New York Armory Show. It was in that year that he did further work on Composition IV and on Bright Picture and Black Lines, which he later described as “purely abstract pictures.” It had been some time coming, but now abstraction had fully arrived.

  Kandsinky was not German. The German role in the birth of abstraction was threefold—the intellectual freedom (relatively speaking) of Munich, the landscape around the city, which so inspired Kandinsky and Münter, and the whole Germanic concern with the inner life, the new world of the sub- or unconscious, which so fascinated Kandinsky and many other artists, writers, and musicians of the time.40 The unconscious sparked three artistic movements (at least) in the twentieth century—abstraction, Dada/Surrealism, and Expressionism. Each began in the German-speaking lands.

  28.

  Berlin Busybody

  In 1871 when Germany was at last unified, following the victory over France by a Prussian-led coalition of German states, Berlin became the capital of the new nation.1 It was not yet the city it would become. It did, however, celebrate the great victory with the largest military parade ever seen there. On Sunday June 16, 1871, in butter-bright sunshine, 40,000 soldiers wearing iron crosses paraded from the Tempelhof Field through the Brandenburg Gate to the royal palace on Unter den Linden. Eighty-one captured French flags, many in tatters, were carried down the route.

  Among the dignitaries at the head of the parade was Helmuth von Moltke, carrying the field marshal’s baton he had just been awarded, and Otto von Bismarck, who had been made a prince. Behind him came Germany’s new Kaiser, Wilhelm I, “his erect posture belying his seventy-four years.” More than one rider fainted from the heat but not the Kaiser’s twelve-year-old grandson, also named Wilhelm, who, despite his withered left arm, contemptuously refused to acknowledge a spectator who called out to him as “Wilhelmkin.”2

  Not everyone agreed that Berlin should be the capital. The Kaiser himself (who was a reluctant emperor) would have preferred Potsdam, seat of Prussia’s greatest king, Friedrich the Great. Non-Prussian Germans disliked Berlin’s eastern orientation, fearing it was no more than a “colonial frontier city on the edges of the Slavic wilderness.” Catholics thought it dangerously Protestant. Theodor Fontane considered it too commercial.3 “The large city has no time for thinking and, what is worse, no time for happiness.”4 This ambivalence was reflected in the fact that the Reichstag was not awarded a building of its own until 1894, until then conducting its business in “an abandoned porcelain factory.”5

  At the time of the victory parade, the city’s population was around 865,000. By 1905, it had passed 2 million, the growth coming mainly through immigration from the east, East Prussia and Silesia. Among the newcomers were many Jews from the Prussian provinces or from eastern Europe. In 1860 Berlin had 18,900 Jews, a figure that rose to 53,900 by 1880. Having been banned in their own countries from owning land or serving in the military, the Ostjuden were experts in commerce, finance, journalism, the arts, and law. The new metropolis was their natural habitat and from 1871 on Berlin became known as “Boomtown on the Spree,” its expansion deriving from three other elements: the abolition of remaining internal tariffs; more liberal rules regarding banks and joint-stock companies; and a sudden infusion of reparations from France, no fewer than 5 billion gold marks. This translated into gold for every man, woman, and child. As David Clay Large puts it, “Imperial Germany was born with a golden spoon in its mouth.”

  This was reflected above all in Berlin. Within two years of unification, 780 new companies were established in Prussia, the country’s greatest banks—the Deutsche, Dresdner, and Darmstädter (the “three Ds”)—were installed there, along with the best of the country’s newspapers.6 Jews were prominent in this new liberal climate and, besides publishing, they took a full role in the rise of the department store (Wertheim, Tietz, and Israel), the stock market, and banking. After 1871, Jews controlled about 40 percent of all banks in the Reich, compared with a quarter owned exclusively by Christians.

  Notable in this field was Gerson Bleichröder, Bismarck’s personal banker and financial adviser. “Bleichröder’s father, the son of a gravedigger, had managed to become the Berlin agent of the powerful Rothschild banking dynasty, thereby building a potent banking business of his own.”7 His astute advice made Bismarck “a respectable prince,” and Bleichröder received the first hereditary title awarded to a Jew in the new Reich. (Yet Bismarck told anti-Semitic jokes about Bleichröder behind his back, “as if half-embarrassed by the riches his Privatjude had earned him.”)8

  There were a number of attempts to make Berlin a rival to Paris or London in regard to its urban amenities. The fashionable residences on Unter den Linden, Berlin’s most famous street, were replaced by shops, restaurants, and hotels. The Kaiser-Gallerie, a glass-covered shopping mall inspired by Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emannuelle opened in 1873, with fifty shops, Viennese-style cafés, and other entertainment facilities. New hotels kept pace, since Berlin was now attracting roughly 30,000 visitors a day, compared to 5,000 before unification.9

  Circumstances were improving on the surface, but were less impressive beneath it. Berlin did not build a modern sewer system until the 1870s and was notorious for its smell. Only later would Berliner Luft (Berlin air) become a source of pride. Men smoked cigars constantly to avoid tasting the Berlin atmosphere. They also smoked while they ate, and peppered concerts and theatrical performances “with bodily sounds quite uncensored.” There was an overwhelming deference to the military, such that a “merchant carrying a pile of hats would step off the sidewalk to allow a sergeant to pass.”10 Berlin’s many beer gardens struck visitors as unfortunate, “raucous places where all social classes crammed together on benches.” And there were numerous “dissolute dancing places,” boasting “nudities in postures difficult to describe.”11

  On February 8, 1873, a National Liberal Reichstag deputy named Edward Lasker made a three-hour speech in parliament that attacked head-on imperial Germany’s economic boom, in particular the railways, which, he said, were little more than a giant house of cards where corrupt officials were protecting get-rich-quick speculators. Some of the unpalatable facts that Lasker released in his speech sparked a wave of selling on the stock market and, when both the Vienna and New York markets crashed, a raft of bankruptcies followed. In 1874, 61 banks, 116 industrial enterprises, and 4 railway companies went under.

  Although the laissez-faire liberals were blamed at first, fingers soon began to point at the Jews, since not a few of the leading liberals and bankers were Jews. This was when Heinrich von Treitschke published his article in the Preussische Jahrbücher in which he used the phrase, “The Jews are our misfortune.” Even Theodor Fontane admitted that his avowed “philosemitism” was tested by these events.12 Bismarck took firm action—but not against the Jews. The economic liberalism of the Gründerzeit was dispensed with, and a program of high tariffs and state subsidies introduced to protect hard-pressed manufacturers. Economic nationalism became the order of the day.

  Anti-Semitism did not disappear. The term itself was coined at that time by a Berlin journalist named Wilhelm Marr, who recognized the change in public sentiment because anti-Jewish agitation in Tsar Alexander III’s Russia had caused Jewish immigration to the German capital to increase rapidly. Although immigration be
came a major political issue, anti-Semitism was always a less disturbing force in Berlin than in Vienna. In Berlin there were countervailing voices to those of Treitschke and Marr—most important, a “Declaration of Notables” was issued, signed by university professors, liberal politicians, and a few progressive industrialists, that condemned anti-Semitism as “a national disgrace” and an “ancient folly.”13

  As the 1870s came to an end, the German economy was recovering, this “second industrial revolution” further aided by Germany’s adoption of the gold standard and the introduction of a single national currency.* The infrastructure was overhauled, a horse-drawn train on rails being introduced in the 1870s, soon to be replaced by a steam railway system (the Ringbahn, or Circle Line) built on the course of the old city wall. Next came the Stadtbahn, or city railway, linking the center of Berlin with its suburbs. Alongside this, electric lamps were introduced on many of the main streets in the 1880s. Mark Twain visited Berlin in 1891 and found it to be “the German Chicago.”14 Julius Langbehn dismissed Berlin as the “epicentre of all modern evil,” its nightlife the embodiment of sin.15

  THE IMPERIAL KNOW-ALL

  Kaiser Wilhelm II also disliked Berlin. For a start, it was far too free-thinking and disrespectful of royalty. Nevertheless, Germany needed a capital to match his ambitions, and he therefore insisted that it must become “the most beautiful city in the world.” To that end he made sure he had a finger in almost every pie: churches, prisons, barracks, hospitals—all bore the imprint of his vision, for good or ill.16

  Under him, the most significant building to be constructed in Berlin was scarcely his favorite. The new Reichstag, started in 1884 and dedicated a decade later, was originally intended to be a simple affair on the Wilhelmstrasse. But politicians and architects alike argued that this would not reflect the “newly unified, glorious German nation, on the verge of taking over the leadership of Europe.” The architect, Paul Wallot, charged with “capturing the German spirit in stone,” produced a cross between the Paris Opera and a Palladian palazzo.17

  Hardly better was the Siegesallee, an avenue built in 1901 in the Tier-garten and lined with marble busts of Hohenzollern heroes. The Kaiser was extremely fond of the Siegesallee and himself produced drawings for the figures, which should, he insisted, resemble his contemporary friends and supporters of royalty. Which is why the Elector Friedrich I, founder of the Hohenzollern dynasty, came to look like Philipp zu Eulenberg, the Kaiser’s closest friend. Many thought the whole project embarrassing and nicknamed the street “Die Puppenallee”—the avenue of the dolls. The Kaiser’s reputation also suffered: this was a man, Berliners quipped, “who could not attend a funeral without wanting to be the corpse.” 18

  Kaiser Wilhelm II saw it as his duty—and his right—to be involved in all aspects of Berlin’s artistic and intellectual life.19 He saw himself as particularly suited to this because he felt he had a gift for drawing and for writing plays. He designed ships and produced a play of his own, titled Sardanapal, in which the central character is a king who sets fire to himself rather than be captured by the enemy. Visiting dignitaries would be forced to sit through performances of his play; among the dignitaries was his uncle, King Edward VII of England, who fell fast asleep until the raucous fire scene, when he suddenly awoke—and called for the fire department to be summoned. In artistic and cultural matters Wilhelm was a backward-looking archconservative, and his constant meddling eventually provoked a backlash.20

  In the theater, matters came to a head in 1889. “[That year] was the year of the German theatrical revolution, just as 1789 was the year of the revolution of humanity,” wrote Otto Brahm, founder of Berlin’s Freie Bühne (Free Stage) movement, somewhat overstating his case to make his point. The Free Stage was a private club and not subject to censorship as public theaters were. For that reason Brahm felt able to produce Ibsen’s Ghosts, otherwise banned because it dealt with syphilis. Emboldened, he next tried Gerhart Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Dawn), an exploration of everyday life among the working classes. Hauptmann (1862–1946), born in Silesia (now part of Poland), would win the Nobel Prize in 1912. He was one of the founders of Realism, again one of those terms that evoke little reaction nowadays, though it was very different in the Kaiser’s Germany.21 At the performances of Before Dawn, brawls were reported in the auditorium between the advocates and opponents of such modernism.22

  Brahm was so encouraged by these reactions that he bought a public theater, the Deutsches Theater, and began mounting ever more political plays. The climax came in 1894 with a production of Hauptmann’s Die Weber (The Weavers), a ferocious indictment of the social conditions condemning Silesian textile workers to extreme poverty in the 1840s.23 The play was banned by the police on the grounds that “it was likely to stir up the lower orders.” Judges overturned the ban after conceding that “the lower orders” could scarcely attend a play where the admission charge was well beyond their means. The Weavers (De Waber in the Silesian dialect) proved a great success.24

  The Kaiser hated what Hauptmann represented. At the end of an evening, he thought, people should leave a performance “not discouraged at the recollection of mournful scenes of bitter disappointment, but purified, elevated, and with renewed strength to fight for the ideals which every man strives to realise.” On the grounds that his plays contravened these self-evident rules, Wilhelm had Hauptmann arrested in 1892 “for subversion.” The courts, to their credit, could find little reason to keep the writer in jail, so the Kaiser tried other methods of intimidation and vetoed Hauptmann’s award of the Schiller Prize for dramatic excellence, giving it instead to one of his favorite hacks.25

  Much the same happened with Max Reinhardt, a Jew from Austria who had arrived in Berlin at the turn of the century intending to be an actor. Reinhardt (1873–1943), born Max Goldmann, arrived when modern theater was taking off in all directions—Wagner, Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg. For him, Berlin was “Vienna multiplied by more than ten,” as he wrote to a friend. Reinhardt never succeeded as an actor, but he turned out to be a brilliant director after he founded his own cabaret called Sound and Smoke. This brought commissions from the legitimate stage, in particular the Deutsches Theater, which he took over from Brahm in 1905 and where he changed the offerings from grim realism into a form of “magic and excitement.”26 He still kept the theater serious—everything from Sophocles to Büchner—but he introduced new lighting effects, new staging techniques, making the theater more spectacular than it had ever been in Berlin. (Marsden Hartley says Reinhardt probably handled the largest theatrical quantities outside wars, volcanic eruptions, or train crashes.)27 There was nothing specific in Reinhardt’s techniques that the Kaiser could object to—it was their very modernity that he didn’t like. Therefore, unable to invoke any law, the Kaiser simply ordered his productions off-limits to the military. Childish to the end, when war broke out in 1914, Wilhelm rejected the playwright’s offer to tour the Front with his company.28

  Another of the great figures in the Berlin cultural world whose admirers did not include the Kaiser was the conductor Hans von Bülow. By the turn of the century, as we have seen, Berlin had long been a center of international respect so far as music was concerned. Ever since 1842, the royal orchestra, once led by Felix Mendelssohn, had had an excellent name. In the 1880s, a second, privately funded symphony orchestra had been established by a certain Benjamin Bilse. The former leader of a military band, he turned his new orchestra into a rival of the royal orchestra but was something of a martinet in style. In 1882, a group of his musicians who had grown weary of being treated in such a domineering way broke off to form a rival outfit, calling themselves the Berlin Philharmonic. Their early years proved difficult and they were forced to perform in a converted roller-skating rink. But in 1887 they came under the direction of Hans von Bülow. Not only was he a brilliant and charismatic conductor himself, who liked the classics and contemporary music equally, but he also had interesting friends. In 1889 he brought one of the
se, Johannes Brahms, to Berlin to conduct his D Minor Concerto. The occasion was a sensation.

  The Kaiser, it will be no surprise to learn, hated modern music as much as he loathed modern art and modern theater.29 He and Bülow clashed in particular over Wagner. Bülow was an experienced interpreter of Wagner, even though the composer had stolen his wife, Cosima, and the Berlin Philharmonic’s offerings of Wagner had become a shining jewel of the Berlin opera scene, which had had little to show for itself since Giacomo Meyerbeer in the 1840s. Even so, many long memories in Berlin could not forget the composer’s support for the revolution of 1848, and the Kaiser used this to put Wagner down. Soon after ascending the throne, he announced portentously that “Gluck is the man for me; Wagner is too noisy.” He had much the same view of Richard Strauss, allowing Strauss to take over at the Royal Opera only because the composer promised he would make Berlin an even greater international center of music than it already was.30 In fact Strauss continued to compose in the discordant way that the Kaiser hated. “I raised a snake in the grass to bite me,” he growled, and told Strauss to his face that he considered his music “worthless.”

  In 1871, at the time of national unification, Berlin was a good way behind Munich in the world of fine art. Munich, as we have seen, had by far the largest community of painters and sculptors. In the 1880s and 1890s, however, as it became clear that Berlin was to be enriched by new monuments and museums, artists began migrating to the new capital. Here too, the Kaiser could never resist taking sides.

  Until the influx, Berlin’s best known artist was Adolf von Menzel, a native of Breslau who had lived in the Prussian capital since 1830. At first Menzel painted impressionistic depictions of Berlin’s rougher edges, its dingy streets and archaic factories (Degas admired Menzel). In the 1870s, however, Menzel changed radically, turning instead to the history of the state and the monarchy.31 For example, The Flute Concert and The Round Table treated the court of Friedrich the Great and did so reverentially; other compositions showed a straightforward adulation for Prussian Macht. The change achieved its aim, and Menzel duly became admitted to the court himself, this “unfortunately ugly painter” soon gracing the playgrounds of high society, which he now chronicled in loving detail. In 1905 the Kaiser marched in his funeral cortege.32